In a world of complexity, continuous change, and crisis, the world requires something different from all leaders. Understanding your emotions is key to leading with heart to make a real difference. We need leaders who will embrace their emotions and transform the world by including all of themselves.

I jest that as part of my career, I went from briefly being an actor, who was continually taking my emotional temperature, to shutting down my emotions completely to live in a cool clinical/academic world. Once in leadership development, I was challenged by teams in turmoil and rife with conflict due to unskillful communication of emotions. 

In order to keep myself safe, I needed to compartmentalize and avoid my emotions. Doing this altered who I was over time.

It wasn’t until the pandemic began and I was assigned to develop a learning series on resilience for healthcare teams that I decided to start feeling the nuance and complexity of my emotions. I realized that I didn’t have to repress my feelings and that attempting to do so was fruitless. Repression does not mean escape, instead, it makes a person more reactive to challenging emotions, not responsive.

I’ve discovered that we can be very confused by our emotions. To begin, they’re complex; we may feel a variety of things toward one person or scenario at the same time. This generates cognitive strain because ambiguity and information gaps are uncomfortable for our brains. Our brains prefer to simply “like” or “dislike”, and decide whether the other is “good” or “bad”. Learning to understand ourselves starts with exploring the nuances and granularity of our emotional experiences.

Next, I wasn’t alone because suppressing or avoiding is a typical approach to emotional management. This simply means that our emotions leak into various aspects of our lives, and we can’t ignore them. Then they seep out with the wrong person, location, or thing, or if we do suppress them over a long period, they could manifest in physical health problems.

Overindulging my emotions was another pitfall I fell into in my early career. This might lead to telling stories about others, such as believing I was a victim, powerless, or villainizing individuals. The “oh woe is me!” can be a narrative that plays out beyond the Shakespearian plays. I was wasting my time, energy, and power by letting cognitive distortions run the show. And when we tell ourselves these stories, they help us justify our current actions and become a blame game.